David Mazower

These forty-nine books, on display in the Yiddish Book Center’s core exhibition Yiddish: A Global Culture, represent a journey into the modern Yiddish imagination. Yiddish readers were voracious in their curiosity and hungry for news of the world around them. Here you will find books about polar exploration, the life of gauchos and ostrich farmers, the origins of Islam, the Spanish Civil War, and Norse legends. The genres include politics, social science, memoirs, poetry, children’s stories, travel writing, reportage, fantasy, literary classics, guidebooks, scientific writing, and musical theater. A cornucopia of Yiddish literature, these books reflect the practical concerns as well as the hopes and dreams of a migrant people.

Each of these volumes has been donated by friends and supporters of the Yiddish Book Center—a tiny sample of the million-plus books that the Center has received since 1980. All are found in just two or three other collections worldwide.

While some of these forty-nine titles are translations of world classics, most are original Yiddish texts. Of these, one or two at most have been translated. Sadly, that too is representative. Despite the exciting surge of new translations in recent years, the vast majority of Yiddish books—numbering somewhere between 40,000 and 60,000 titles, including outstanding works of fiction and nonfiction—remain inaccessible to all but the relatively small number of Yiddish readers.

About the Editor

David Mazower is research bibliographer and editorial director at the Yiddish Book Center. He is also the chief curator and writer of the Center’s landmark permanent exhibition, Yiddish: A Global Culture. Prior to joining the Center, he was a senior staff journalist with BBC World News in London and deputy curator of the Jewish Museum London. He writes for the Digital Yiddish Theatre Project and is the author of Yiddish Theatre in London. His dozens of published articles include several on his great-grandfather, Yiddish writer Sholem Asch, as well as explorations of Yiddish theater and popular culture, British Jewish history, Jewish art, and the Yiddish salon of Bronx poet Bertha Kling. He graduated in history from Cambridge University and has a postgraduate diploma in Russian.